Against Faustus the Manichaean 1.1–3.6

There was a certain Faustus, an African by birth, a citizen of Milevis, pleasant in speech, clever in mind, a Manichaean by sect and therefore perverted by an abominable error. I knew the man myself, as I mentioned in the books of my Confessions. He published a certain volume against the right Christian faith and the catholic truth. When it came into our hands and had been read by the brothers, they wished, and by the right of the love through which we serve them they demanded, that we should answer him. This I will now undertake in the name and with the help of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, so that all who read this may understand how worthless a sharp mind and a polished tongue are, unless a man’s steps are directed by the Lord. This has been granted to many who are even slower and weaker, by the hidden justice of divine mercy, while many very sharp and very eloquent men, deserted by the help of God, have run swiftly and stubbornly to stray farther from the way of truth. I think it convenient to set down his words under his name and my reply under mine.

Faustus said: Since the errors and the deceit both of the Jewish superstition and of the semi-Christians have already been brought to light more than enough and fully exposed by the most learned Adimantus, the only one, I mean, whom we should study after our blessed father Mani, it seemed not out of place, dearest brothers, to write for you also these brief and neat answers, on account of the cunning and crafty propositions of those who debate with us, so that when they, after the manner of their parent the serpent, try to entrap you with captious little questions, you too may be watchfully prepared to answer them. For so it will come about that, tied to the very points they have put forward, they cannot wander further this way and that. And so that the minds of readers might not be flooded by a profuse or confused discourse, I have set their words and ours against each other, as briefly as distinctly.

Augustine replied: You think that semi-Christians are to be guarded against, and you say that we are such; but we guard against pseudo-Christians, and we show that you are such. For what is half is incomplete in some part, but false in none. What then? If something is lacking in the faith of those whom you try to entrap, must what they have therefore be destroyed, and not rather what is lacking be built up? As the apostle says, speaking to some who were imperfect: “rejoicing and seeing your way of life, and what is lacking in your faith in Christ.” He surely saw a kind of spiritual building, as he says elsewhere, “You are God’s building,” and in it he saw both a reason to rejoice and a reason to be anxious. He rejoiced at what he saw already built; he was anxious because he perceived that it still had to be built up to the summit of perfection. So it is those of us who are truly catholics, though not yet perfect, and in a sense, as you said, semi-Christians, that you hunt out, to deceive and seduce them by your perversity. But if any are still such, once they understand that you are pseudo-Christians, even if they cannot answer the captious propositions of your questions because of what is lacking in their faith, they nevertheless know that you are not to be followed but avoided. So, just as your aim is to seek out semi-Christians to deceive, our aim is to show that you are pseudo-Christians, so that not only may more skilled Christians expose you by refuting you, but the less skilled may also profit by avoiding you. But why did you call the serpent our father? Has it slipped your mind how you are accustomed to find fault with God, who gave the man a commandment in paradise, and to praise the serpent, because by its counsel it opened his eyes? I think it is just that you should rather acknowledge as your parent that serpent, the devil, whom you praise; for he acknowledges you as his son even now, when you blame him.

Faustus said: Do you accept the gospel? Most certainly. Then do you also accept that Christ was born? That is not so. For it does not follow that, if I accept the gospel, I must therefore also accept that Christ was born. Why? Because the gospel both began to exist and began to be so named from the preaching of Christ, and in it he himself nowhere says that he was born of human beings. But the genealogy is so far from being the gospel that not even its writer dared to call it the gospel. For what did he write? “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David.” So not “the book of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” but “the book of the generation”; and there a star is also brought in, which confirms the nativity, so that it could rightly be called a “genesidium” rather than a gospel. And finally Mark, who did not care to write about the generation but only about the preaching of the Son of God, which is the gospel, see how fittingly he began: “The gospel,” he says, “of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” so that from this it is abundantly clear that the genealogy is not the gospel. For in Matthew himself too, after John had been shut up in prison, we read that only then did Jesus begin to preach the gospel of the kingdom. So whatever is narrated before this is evidently genealogy, not gospel. Otherwise, what prevented Matthew too from writing “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” except that he thought it improper to call a genealogy the gospel? Therefore, if it is now clear enough to you, as you did not know until now, that the gospel is one thing and the genealogy quite another, know that I accept the gospel, as I said, that is, the preaching of Christ. Whatever you wish to ask about it, ask, leaving the generations aside. Or if you have a mind to debate about those too, I do not refuse, since I have plenty to answer about them as well; but learn to ask first what comes first. For you seem to me now to want to know, not whether I accept the gospel, but whether I accept the generations.

Augustine replied: Certainly you questioned yourself, as if speaking for us, whether you accept the gospel, and you answered, “Most certainly.” And again you asked yourself whether you accept that Christ was born, and answered, “That is not so,” giving as your reason that the generation of Christ does not belong to the gospel. What then will you answer the apostle when he says: “Remember that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel”? You surely see how you do not know, or pretend not to know, what the gospel is, and that you name the gospel not from apostolic teaching but from your own error. But if you call gospel what the apostles called gospel, you stray from the gospel, since you do not believe that Christ is of the seed of David, which the apostle testified was preached according to his gospel. And what was the gospel of the apostle Paul was also that of the other apostles and of all faithful stewards of so great a mystery. For he says elsewhere: “Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.” Not all of them wrote a gospel, yet all preached the gospel. Those who narrate the origin, deeds, sayings, and sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ are properly called evangelists. For if we ask what the word itself means in Latin, evangelium means good news or a good announcement. This can indeed be said whenever anything good is announced; but properly the word has come to belong to that announcement of the Savior of which I spoke. If you announce something else, it is clear that you are outside the gospel. Surely the little ones whom you call semi-Christians stand against you, if they hear the voice of their mother, love, sounding to them from the apostle’s mouth: “If anyone announces to you anything other than what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.” Since Paul himself, according to his gospel, announced Christ of the seed of David, you who deny this and announce something else are anathema. And who does not see with what blindness it is said that Christ nowhere says that he was born of human beings, when he almost never stops calling himself the Son of Man?

But of course, most learned men, you bring out for us from your bookcase some First Man or other, who came down from the nation of light to subdue the nation of darkness, armed with his waters against the enemy’s waters, with his fire against the enemy’s fire, and with his winds against the enemy’s winds. Why then was he not also armed with his smoke against the enemy’s smoke and with his darkness against the enemy’s darkness, but, as you say, with air against smoke and with light against darkness? Is it because smoke and darkness are evil that his goodness could not have them? Then those three, water, wind, and fire, are good. Why then could the malice of the hostile nation have them? Here you answer: “But that water of the nation of darkness was evil, while the water the First Man brought was good; and its wind was evil, but his was good; so too his good fire fought against its evil fire.” Why then could he not also bring good smoke against evil smoke? Or do your lies vanish and fail at smoke, like smoke itself? Certainly your First Man waged war against a contrary nature. Why then, against those five elements which you invent in the contrary nation, was only one contrary brought from the divine realms, light against darkness? For the other four are not contraries. Air is not contrary to smoke, much less water to water, wind to wind, and fire to fire.

And now, who can listen to those sacrilegious ravings, when you say that your First Man, in order to catch the enemy, changed and transformed the elements he carried to suit the will of the enemy, so that the kingdom which you call the kingdom of falsehood, remaining in its own nature, fought without deceit, while the substance of truth appeared changeable in order to deceive? You want the Lord Jesus Christ to be believed to be the son of this First Man. You call truth the daughter of this invented fable. This First Man, whom you praise because he fought the hostile nation with changeable and lying forms: if you speak the truth, you do not imitate him; but if you imitate him, you too are lying. Therefore our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, true and truthful Son of God, true and truthful Son of Man, both of which he testifies of himself, derived the eternity of divinity from the true God and the origin of flesh from a true human being. Apostolic teaching does not know your First Man. Hear the apostle Paul: “The first man,” he says, “was from the earth, earthly; the second man from heaven, heavenly. As was the earthly, so also are the earthly; as is the heavenly, so also are the heavenly. As we have borne the image of the earthly, let us also bear the image of him who is from heaven.” So the first man, from the earth, earthly, is Adam, formed from clay; but the second man, from heaven, heavenly, is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the Son of God, came to the flesh, so that by taking it he might both become man outwardly and remain God inwardly, and so be both the true Son of God, through whom we were made, and become the true Son of Man, through whom we were remade. Why then do you bring forward from who knows where your invented First Man, and refuse to acknowledge the first man whom apostolic teaching teaches? Is it so that what the apostle himself says may be fulfilled in you: “They will turn their hearing away from the truth and turn aside to fables”? Paul proclaims a first man from the earth, earthly; Mani proclaims a first man not earthly, clothed with who knows what five deceitful elements. And Paul says: “If anyone announces to you anything other than what we have announced to you, let him be anathema.” So, lest Paul be a liar, let Mani be anathema.

And as for your slandering the star by which the magi were led to worship the infant Christ, are you not ashamed, when you do not place your invented Christ, the son of your invented First Man, under a star’s testimony, but say that he is bound up in all the stars? For you believe that he was mixed with the princes of darkness in that battle in which your First Man fought against the nation of darkness, so that the world was made out of those captured princes of darkness with whom he was mixed. Hence these sacrilegious ravings force you to say that Christ is fixed, bound, and compacted not only in the sky and in all the stars, but also in the earth and in everything that grows from it; no longer your Savior, but one to be saved by you, when you eat those things and belch them. For, seduced by this impious vanity, you seduce your hearers into bringing you food, so that Christ, bound in it, may be helped by your teeth and stomachs. For you preach that he is loosed and freed by such help; and not even wholly, but you maintain that remnants of him, small and filthy though they be, still remain in excrement, so that they are held again and again, entangled and enmeshed, in one bodily form after another, and, if they cannot be loosed and purified while the world stands, they will be loosed and purified by that last fire in which the world itself will burn. Yet even then, you say, the whole Christ cannot be freed, but the last, leftover particles of his good and divine nature, so defiled that they can in no way be washed clean, are condemned forever, fixed to the dreadful globe of darkness. See: men who pretend to be indignant that the Son of God is wronged because a star is said to have shown his birth, as if his nativity were placed under a fatal constellation, themselves place him not only under the conjunction of the stars, but in the bonds of all earthly things, in the juices of all plants, in the putrefaction of all flesh and the corruption of all foods, so bound and polluted that in great part, though not wholly, he cannot be loosed and purified unless he is belched up by human beings, namely by the elect of the Manichaeans, even in leeks and radishes. We, for our part, place no human being’s nativity under the fate of the stars, so that, for the sake of God’s just judgment, we may defend from every bond of necessity the free choice of the will, by which one lives well or badly. How much less do we believe that the temporal birth of him who is the eternal Creator and Lord of all things took place under the condition of the stars! So that star which the magi saw did not rule over Christ, born according to the flesh, by decree, but served him as a witness; it did not subject him to its command, but pointed him out in obedience. Therefore it was not one of those stars which from the beginning of creation keep the order of their courses under the Creator’s law, but at the new birth from a virgin a new star appeared, which performed the service of its office for the magi themselves as they sought Christ, going before their face until, going ahead, it led them to the very place where the Word of God was an infant. What astrologers ever placed the fates of people at birth under the stars in such a way as to assert that, when some person was born, one of the stars left the order of its course and went to the one who was born? For they think that the lot of one being born is bound to the order of the stars, not that the order of the stars can be changed for the day of a man’s birth. Therefore, if that star was one of those that run their courses in the sky, how could it decree what Christ would do once born, when at Christ’s birth it was ordered to abandon what it was doing? But if, as is more probably believed, it arose, not having existed before, to point out Christ, Christ was not born because it appeared, but it appeared because Christ was born. Hence, if it had to be said, we would say not that the star was Christ’s fate, but that Christ was the star’s fate. For he gave it the cause of its birth, not it to him. If, then, there are fates (fata), which are named from fari, that is, from speaking, since Christ is the Word of God, in whom all things were spoken before they existed, the conjunction of the stars is not the fate of Christ, but Christ is the fate even of the stars; he took on flesh itself, created under heaven, by the same will by which he also created heaven, and he laid it down and took it up again by the same power by which he also commanded the stars.

Why then should what is narrated about this birth not be gospel, when such good news is announced to us in it that by it our weakness is healed? Is it because Matthew did not begin by saying, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” as Mark says, but, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ”? In that way John too would not be said to have written a gospel, since he also does not say “the beginning of the gospel” or “the book of the gospel,” but “In the beginning was the Word.” Unless perhaps Faustus was so elegant a coiner of words that he would also have named this opening of John a “verbidium” because of the Word (verbum), as he dared to call the other a “genesidium” because of the genesis. But why do you not rather consider with what shamelessness you call those long and impious fables of yours a gospel? For what good is announced there, where it is said that God could not otherwise provide for and protect his kingdom against some rebellious, contrary, and alien nature or other than by sending part of his own nature into its greedy jaws to be devoured, and to be so polluted that after such labors and torments it could not even be wholly purified? Is such bad news a gospel? Certainly all who know even a little Greek translate evangelium as good news or a good announcement. But how is this good news, since you are told that God himself mourns behind a veil set before him until his members are restored and purified from that devastation and contamination? If he ever ends his mourning, he will be cruel. For what wrong has that part of him done him which will be bound in the globe? It surely must be mourned forever, since it will be condemned forever. But we have escaped: whoever pays careful attention to this news is not forced to mourn because it is bad, but to laugh because it is false.

Faustus said: Do you accept the generation, then? For a long time I did try to persuade myself of this very thing, whatever it is, that God was born; but, offended above all by the disagreement of the two evangelists who write his genealogy, Luke and Matthew, I stuck, uncertain which of them I should follow. For I thought it possible that, since I have no foreknowledge, the one I judged to be lying might be telling the truth, and the one I judged to be speaking the truth might perhaps be lying. So, leaving their endless and interminable dispute, I betook myself to John and Mark, not an unequal exchange, from two to two, and from evangelists to professors of the same name. Their beginnings, for the present, pleased me, and not without reason, because they bring in neither David nor Mary nor Joseph; but John says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, meaning Christ; while Mark says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” as if reproving Matthew, who put “the son of David”—unless perhaps the one proclaims one Jesus and the other another. This, then, is the reason why I do not accept that Christ was born. But if you are great enough to remove this stumbling block from me, make them agree with each other, and I will give way somehow; although even so it will not be fitting to believe that God, and the God of Christians, was born from a womb.

Augustine replied: O, if you had read the gospel with devout zeal, and had preferred to inquire carefully rather than to condemn rashly the things in the evangelists that troubled you as contradictions, then at least, because of the very obvious contradiction that meets one, so to speak, at first sight, you would have reflected that, unless something great lay hidden there, it could hardly have happened that such authority would be granted to them throughout the world as to bring under it the minds of so many very learned men. For what great thing is it to see what you saw: that Luke records some ancestors of Christ according to the flesh and Matthew others, though both make Joseph the point, Matthew the one with whom he ends, Luke the one with whom he begins? Because of a certain holy and virginal marriage with Christ’s mother, Joseph also deserved to be called a parent of Christ, so that, because of the dignity of the male, the generations were traced from him or down to him. What great thing is it, then, that you saw: that Joseph has one father according to Matthew and another according to Luke, one grandfather according to this one and another according to that one, and so on upward to David, through so many generations, different ancestors are listed by the one and by the other? Did so many sharp and learned men, most careful students of the divine Scriptures, not see so open and obvious a difference? In the Latin language they are very few, but who could count them in Greek? They plainly saw it. For what is easier? Or who, looking even a little, does not see it? But reflecting devoutly on the eminence of so great an authority, they believed that something lay hidden there that would be given to those who ask and denied to those who bark at it, found by those who seek and withdrawn from those who find fault, opened to those who knock and shut to those who attack. They asked, they sought, they knocked; they received, they found, they entered.

The whole question, surely, is how Joseph could have had two fathers. For if it is shown that this could happen, there is no reason at all why either of these evangelists should be believed to have said something false in listing different generations. For with two fathers it will no longer be strange or contradictory that there could also be two grandfathers, two great-grandfathers, and two great-great-grandfathers, and so on up to David, whose sons both were: Solomon, who belongs to the line that Matthew followed, and Nathan, who is in the series that Luke set out. Some people consider these things and see that a human being cannot be begotten by two men through carnal union, and so they think this question cannot be solved. And they do not notice what is very common and very easy: that a person’s father is called not only the one by whom he was begotten, but also the one by whom he was adopted. For the bond of adoption was not foreign to the customs of the ancients, since we find even women adopting as their sons children not born of their own womb, as Sarah did from Hagar, and Leah from her maidservant, and Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses. And Jacob himself adopted his grandsons, the sons of Joseph. Apostolic teaching testifies that the very name of adoption has great weight in the mystery of our faith. So the apostle Paul, speaking of the privileges of the Jews, says: “To whom belong the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law; whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”; and again he says: “And we ourselves groan within ourselves, awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body”; and again in another place: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive the adoption of sons.” How great a mystery this adoption is appears clearly enough from these and similar testimonies. For God has one only Son, whom he begot from his own substance, of whom it is said: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not think it robbery to be equal with God.” But us he did not beget from his substance; for we are a creature, which he did not beget but made; and therefore, to make us brothers of Christ in our own manner, he adopted us. So this way, by which God, when we had not been born of him but created and established by him, begot us by his Word and his grace so that we might be his sons, is called adoption. Hence John says: “He gave them power to become sons of God.” Since, then, the right of adopting sons was customary among our fathers and in the holy Scriptures, what madness of impiety drives you to accuse the evangelists of falsehood first, because they recorded different generations, as if both could not be true, rather than to consider, attend, and see what is very easy: how, by a frequent custom of the human race, one man could have two fathers, one by whose flesh he was begotten as a human being, the other by whose will, when he was already a human being, he was adopted as a son? If the latter is not rightly called father, neither do we rightly say, “Our Father, who art in heaven,” to him from whose substance we were not born, but by whose grace and most merciful will we have been adopted, according to apostolic teaching and most faithful truth. For we have him as God and Lord and Father: God, because we were created by him, though through human parents; Lord, because we are subject to him; Father, because we have been reborn by his adoption. It was easy, then, for devout searchers of the divine writings to reflect a little and to see, in the different generations of Christ recorded by the two evangelists, how Joseph could have two fathers, whose different ancestors are listed. You too could easily see this, if the zeal for contention did not blind you. But those men also sought and found other things, as they examined every part of these narratives; but those are very far removed from your understanding. So even while you remain in Mani’s error, you could see by reflection, if you did not read with a hostile mind, what commonly happens in human affairs: that one man begets a son in the flesh and another adopts him by will, and so one man has two fathers.

But why Matthew began from Abraham and came down to Joseph, while Luke began from Joseph and went up not to Abraham but to God, who made man and, having given him a commandment, gave him power to become a son of God by believing; and why the one listed the generations themselves at the head of his book, but the other when the Lord and Savior had been baptized by John; and what is meant by the number of the generations in Matthew, that they are arranged as three times fourteen, though when they are added up one seems to be missing, while the number of the generations in Luke, recorded at the Lord’s baptism, comes to seventy-seven, the number the Lord himself commends in the forgiveness of sins when he says, “not only seven times, but seventy times seven”: these things you could in no way track down, unless either you heard them from some catholic, not just anyone but one devoted to the study of the divine Scriptures and as skilled as he could be, or you yourselves, corrected from your error, with catholic devotion asked so as to receive, sought so as to find, and knocked so as to enter.

Therefore, since what disturbed Faustus about the difference of the generations, because the knot lay in understanding two fathers, has been untied by understanding nature and adoption, he wanted in vain to betake himself to two evangelists and to take himself away from the other two, likely to offend those to whom he went more than those from whom he withdrew. For the saints do not love those who choose them if they find them to be deserters of their companions. For they rejoice in unity and are one in Christ; and if one says one thing and another another, or one in one way and another in another, yet all speak the truth and in no way contradict one another, if a devout reader approaches them, if he reads meekly, if he looks not with a heretical mind for something to quarrel about, but with a faithful heart for something to be built up by. Now, therefore, since we have believed that each evangelist undertook to narrate the generations of one of the fathers, and since it is not foreign to the human race that one man should have two, our faith is not foreign to the truth. So, now that the evangelists agree with each other, give way somehow, as Faustus promised.

Or does what he added still trouble you: “Although even so,” he says, “it will not be fitting to believe that God, and the God of Christians, was born from a womb”? As if we believed that the divine nature itself came into existence from a woman’s womb! Did I not just now recall the apostle’s testimony, where he says of the Jews: “whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”? So Christ our Lord and Savior, true Son of God according to divinity and true Son of Man according to the flesh, was born of a woman not in that he is God over all, blessed forever, but in that weakness which he took from us, so that in it he might die for us and heal it in us. He was born of a woman not from the form of God, in which, though he was, he did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but from the form of a servant, by taking which he emptied himself. For he is said to have emptied himself for no other reason than by taking the form of a servant, not by losing the form of God. For while that nature by which, in the form of God, he is equal to the Father remained unchangeable, he took our changeable nature, through which he might be born of a virgin. But you, while you shudder at entrusting the flesh of Christ to a virgin’s womb, have entrusted the very divinity of God to the wombs not only of human beings but also of dogs and pigs. You refuse to believe that the flesh of Christ was conceived once in the womb of a virgin, in which God was not only not bound, but not even changed; and you preach that the very part of God, the divine nature, is bound, oppressed, and defiled in the male seeds and female wombs of all human beings and beasts, in all conceptions, through all lands, all waters, and all airs, and cannot even be wholly freed afterward!